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🎙️ Sam Mathew, CTO & Co-Founder, twentyfour26 on Fondo START  

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Check out twentyfour26.com

Shipping code got faster. Security has to keep up.

Before starting Trident, Dekai Li’s co-founder saw a workflow that concerned him:

A product manager supplied a project description. An engineer pasted it into a coding agent. The output became a pull request.

Dekai’s concern: manual pentesting couldn’t keep pace with how quickly developers were shipping.

That’s the problem they built Trident to address.

Trident uses AI to continuously pentest applications and APIs, review code, and identify security issues across cloud infrastructure.

But finding a possib...

The earnings call gets the headlines. The shareholder vote can change the company.

CEO compensation. Board control. Major corporate transactions.

Some of the biggest decisions at public companies are shaped through shareholder votes - but most people never see the work behind them.

Ryan Nowicki Stewart spent years inside that process.

At State Street, he met with boards and C-suites and helped the firm arrive at voting decisions as a major institutional shareholder.

Later, at PJT, he sat on the other side of the table, advising companies navigating those...

Most companies ask what they should post on LinkedIn.

Sky Yang is focused on a more valuable question:

How does all that activity actually translate into growth?

At Imagine AI, his team is treating LinkedIn less like a content calendar and more like a measurable growth system.

They study how content performs, who it reaches, and how those interactions connect back to prospects and the deal cycle—then use that data to help companies make better decisions about what to say and who should say it.

It starts before a...

Every AI model. One key. Zero markup.

That’s the starting point. The bigger ambition: help companies turn their AI traffic into better models they own

Silen Naihin helped grow AutoGPT to 160,000 GitHub stars. Now, at Experiential Labs, he’s working to bring model access, evaluation and training into one unified experience. 

The open-source gateway gives companies control over model access. From there, the team is building simulations around their traffic to understand different workloads and recommend models based on three things: cost, quality and speed.

The goal goes beyond choosing a mod...

“I don't believe Claude Code will exist in its current form in six months”

Ben Swerdlow, founder of Freestyle, thinks coding agents are moving from local machines to the cloud, where a single task could get the attention of 20 agents at once.

Each gets a complete copy of your stack, production environment included. Each can spend a week testing and refining its approach. You compare the results and take the best one forward.

The economics aren’t there yet. Ben expects cost per task to fall another 99% over the next four years, making that l...

For years designers made pictures of a product and engineers turned them into code

AI changed that. Designers can now build with code themselves

But their work is scattered. One of Putri Karunia's users told her he now spends only about 10% of his time in Figma. The rest is split across code, prototypes and code changes for engineers to review

The AI coding tools also work one step at a time. Ask for something, get something back, ask again

Design doesn't work that way. You try a few ideas side by...

There are over a billion cameras in the world. They can all see. Almost none of them can tell you what they saw.

Andrey Gizdov has been in computer vision since 2016, when CNNs were all the rage, researching real-time vision models.

He met his co-founder Vishal Urlam at a hackathon. His co-founder had deployed cameras and IoT devices across India's power grid to monitor it.

Then they went to conferences on cameras and intelligence and found the state of affairs grim.

From that point, they knew this was a company that...

Quippy lets you rehearse the conversation before you have it.

Pushing back on a boss. A first date. Short practice scenarios, line-by-line feedback on what landed and what backfired, and the app turns your weak spots into drills. Then you do it again tomorrow, and it gets sharper each round because it's learning what you specifically keep getting wrong.

Jonathan Li built the whole thing solo, and he's in the current Fall YC batch.

His bet is on the habit, more so than the content. You can build a genuinely good curriculum for...

A CFO at a publicly traded company on variable AI pricing:

"This is introducing my worst nightmare, which is a blank check"

 Claude, Codex, Cursor, Devin, Gemini...

 Every workflow creates usage and every token creates cost, and unlike something like a Gong license, the price isn't fixed.

 That's the problem Eric Chernoff is building Fancysauce to solve: AI Cost Management, extra Fancy.
 
Track usage, monitor ROI and optimize spend across every AI workflow.
 
Fancysauce shows every token and ties it to the team, product, model and business value...

Somewhere, someone already has the thing you're looking for. 

A dataset, a patent, a capability, a customer, an answer. Most of the time neither of you ever finds out.

That's the problem Ryaan Aqid built Quirk around, and he first recognized it in Bangladesh, watching workers earning $50–100 a month while Upwork listed work paying ten times more. Nothing separated them except information. The opportunity already existed; the connection never happened.

It runs through everything. Institutions sit on datasets they'll never open, companies shelve technology somebody else is desperate for, and entire markets fail to...

Spend enough at a luxury house and someone actually calls to ask how the bag is working out. Ilya Valmianski brought that up on the show as the piece of retail everyone else quietly gave up on, less because it stopped working than because people are expensive and most brands can't put a store associate on every order.

Signals makes that level of attention cheap enough to give every customer one.

Today it looks like an AI store associate that reaches customers over iMessage after they buy. It answers sizing questions, recommends exchanges when something...

Voice AI can pass a Turing test. For about a minute.

That's a generated clip, though. Have a human actually talk back and the number collapses to six or seven seconds, roughly where generated voice sat three years ago.

One reason, per Aoden Teo of Miso Labs: real conversation isn't turn-based. Around 20% of the time more than one person is speaking, and laughter drives a lot of that overlap, since you laugh at a joke while it's still being told. We also adjust our pacing toward whoever we're talking to without noticing we're doing it.<...

It started with a dream. “Guys, let’s make it to the GRAMMYs.” 18 months later, he did it. 

Zach Nieman’s GRAMMY-Nominated production “Cali Coast (Psionics Remix)” by Soul Pacific led him to walk the red carpet and planted the seeds for his first startup. 

It all began when he was recording music at home. The gear was right. The room wasn't.

Zach had the interface, the cables, the mics, and the chops to lay down a real take. He hit record and realized: “It sounded like garbage.”

So he built a workaround: a fr...

Fine-tune a frontier LLM on addition and it handles one through five digits without breaking a sweat. Six digits, a friend of Varun's found performance collapsing to zero.

The model had learned addition up to the length it saw in training and nothing underneath it, no rule it could extend. Varun calls it a fatal flaw, one he expects to surface in deep tech and safety-critical applications, and rather than argue about it he'd rather hand builders a way to look inside and check.

You hand Envariant 50 examples where your model tells the truth and 50...

Hollywood-grade storytelling, startup-speed execution.

Most AI ads feel disposable. Rubbrband is betting the future looks cinematic instead.

Jeremy Lee, Abhinav Gopal, and Darren Hsu: 3 CS researchers out of Berkeley who loved film built video models for Hollywood.

They got good enough at cinematic content that they now do it for some of the world's top brands, and they do it without the hundreds of thousands of dollars companies have been handing traditional ad studios.

Discovery call, creative brief, script, production. Start to finish in weeks, not months. With real narrative and...

You can't do a joke about the Jira board at a normal comedy club. The audience won't know what the Jira board is, and explaining it kills the laugh before you get to it.

Neal Patel wanted to do that set anyway. 

For years he worked two jobs, software engineer during the day and stand-up three or four nights a week in New York clubs at night. 

Plenty of the comedians he ran into were also in tech. Backstage they'd trade jokes about tech, about Jira, and all the little things that only pe...

Creating video is getting easier. Finishing it isn't.

AI writes code and you still review it before it ships. AI makes clips now, and someone still has to assemble them into something you'd actually publish. That's the layer cofounders Saksham and Ishan are building at Cardboard.

Two engineers who met in school and taught themselves filmmaking in Bangalore by studying Apple's launch films. Saksham describes Cardboard simply: it's Cursor for video editing.

There's no good VS Code for video, so they're building one. You throw your clips in and give it a goal...

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🎙️ Irtiza Aftab, CEO, Doppel Labs on Fondo START

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00:59 — What Doppel Labs is building
01:30 — Tools the team runs day to day
02:05 — Inside the closed alpha and university pilots
02:35 — Connecting LLM apps over MCP and APIs
03:00 — Why context matters more than the model
03:25 — Waitlist and open source plans

Check out at www.doppellabs.ai

30 petabytes of collider data.

That was Jayram Palamadai's job at CERN, where he worked as a distributed computing engineer getting collider data out to physicists. At that scale you stop thinking about files and start questioning the protocol underneath them, so he designed a different architecture.

That became Byteport.

It's built on DART, a proprietary transport protocol developed by engineers out of CERN. TCP cuts its congestion window the moment it detects packet loss and then recovers slowly; DART holds near-constant throughput instead, roughly 98 Mbps on a 100 Mbps connection whatever the latency, jitter...

Pioneer Fund met Gaurav Maken at Y Combinator Demo Day, and today he works there as Community Partner.

What stayed with him was the way the meeting ran. The people across the table were curious rather than performing, and they wanted to understand what he was building.

That's carried into how Pioneer operates now. The team preps hard for every 30-minute founder meeting, several founder-investors join each call, and they'll tell a founder what they like and what they don't, because they've sat on the other side of that table and know how it feels...

Every startup can build a demo.

Then comes everything else: authentication, databases, hosting, monitoring, email, analytics, real-time infrastructure. None of it makes the demo, and every team rebuilds it anyway.

Aram Shatakhtsyan spent nearly a decade scaling a startup and kept hitting the same thing. Too much engineering went into infrastructure that looked nearly identical from one product to the next.

Modelence is a production-ready framework and cloud platform for the era of AI-generated software, where developers spend their time on product logic instead of rebuilding the same foundation.

Generate a...

99% of U.S. banks aren't JPMorgan.
All of them are regulated like it.

The bottleneck isn't serving customers.
It's everything that happens after.

Loans.
Compliance.
Fraud investigations.
Customer operations.

The work keeps growing.
Headcount doesn't.

JPMorgan has tens of thousands of analysts.
A community bank has a handful.

That's the gap Fenrock AI is closing.

Fenrock is building the first AI workspace for the banking back office.

Built alongside U.S. bank CEOs.
Designed for banks.
...

Scientific discovery shouldn't slow down because of software.

But every instrument in the lab ships its own, and someone has to learn all of them.

Researchers don't want to memorize instrument interfaces.

They want experiments to run.
They want answers.
They want data.

That's the problem Infera is solving.

Chloe Sow knows that side of it. Mechanical engineering at Harvard, research at Brigham and Women's, building medical devices and running the experiments by hand.

Her co-founder Troy Cheng spent an entire research summer figuring out...

You can track a burrito from the restaurant to your door in real time

You donate to a family in a crisis zone. Usually you get a thank-you email. That's where it ends.

Nasrat Khalid couldn't understand why.

We expect complete visibility when we order dinner.
Why not when we're helping another human being?

So he built Aseel. 
A platform for "everything do good"

You buy a food package. 
You see exactly who receives it. 
You can ask for a photo of the delivery.
...

AI changed how software gets built.

The tools we use after we ship haven't caught up.

Code is getting cheaper.

Production is getting harder.

That's the gap Sherwood Callaway saw after building with Cursor and Claude Code. AI had transformed how software gets built, but when something broke in production, he was back clicking through observability tools that hadn't kept pace.

Sazabi is built for AI-native engineering teams.

→ Autonomous alerts with root-cause context
→ Conversational debugging instead of endless dashboards
→ AI that learns your codebase, architecture, and pa...

Your product didn't fail.
No one saw it.

The best product often loses
Not because it's worse
Because no one saw it

Teams ship daily

Marketing got faster too

It just never stopped needing you

Open the recorder.
Fumble the demo.
Redo it fifteen times.

Edit
Design
Post

Your flow is gone.

So next time you don't bother

That's how good products disappear

Cyrus Kelly and co-founder David McDonough were involved in 11...

A phone call used to mean trust.

Now it could be AI.

DetectifAI is building the next layer of cybersecurity for the AI era

Not another chatbot

Not another AI wrapper

Foundational models built to detect audio deepfakes

It started with something personal.

Tarini's grandfather lost thousands of dollars to a simple deepfake.

That moment became the reason to build.

Tarini had already been in machine learning since grade six

Nearly a decade studying how AI works

100,000 users sounds like a dream

Until you're personally answering 50+ support tickets a day...

That was Dawson Chen.

He'd scaled Martin, an AI personal assistant, to more than 100,000 users, but growth came with a new problem: 

Refund requests

Subscription cancellations

Login issues

And the same support questions over and over again...

To keep up, the team hired a virtual assistant and relied on tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk. 

But every ticket meant jumping between their inbox, Stripe, their database, and th...

As a founder, Emma Lawler felt like SOC 2 was a major distraction from building.

But when she started selling to enterprise logos, it became something that was impossible to ignore.

Now, as Product Lead at Rippling, she channeled her first-hand experience of getting SOC 2 compliant to rethink how all automated compliance frameworks are run. 

It started with a retro. 

Every other SOC 2 vendor works the same way: 

Detect a problem
Alert your team
Fix it...somewhere else

The problem with this checklist is that "somewhere els...

96% of users aren't saying no to your product.
They're saying no to your paywall.

And the only tool most teams have for that is manual A/B tests.

Thousands of dollars per experiment. Weeks to trust one result. One variable at a time. Every test starts from zero.

Stop guessing. Start compounding.

Tranzmit AI builds, tests, and evolves paywalls instead.

Analyze the behavioral data, generate variants, score them against simulation and conversion history, ship the winner with guardrails and auto-rollback.

50x faster than manual A/B.<...

Right now most AI agents interact with software the way humans do

They open a browser, look at a screenshot, and try to figure out what to click

That's like ripping the LIDAR off a Waymo and handing it a camera

Tarun & Alex kept running into this problem. 

They were building an AI receptionist for dentists, and at conference after conference people asked the same thing: do you integrate with X or Y platform?

Seven other people were doing the same thing. None of them could integrate. Alex and T...

Before AI, marketing teams built five creatives for every campaign.

Now they can generate fifty.

But more content didn't solve marketing.

It exposed a new bottleneck.

Most of it is slop.

AI solved the quantity problem.

It created a quality problem.

Kyle Wong and co-founder Colin Tseung built InstaAgent to solve the second one.

A consumer brand hands InstaAgent a single marketing brief. From there, the team handles the strategy, the creative, the distribution, and the analytics.

The result isn't 50 generic...

1.2 billion people struggle with addiction.
There will never be enough clinicians to treat them.

Koby Conrad believes AI changes that equation.

His own story starts much smaller.
High 24/7 from 19 to 24.
He got sober.
Taught himself to code.
Built a side project called Sunflower.

Years later, that side project became a VC-backed company with a much bigger ambition.

Today, Sunflower has:
→ 500,000+ users and counting
→ Grown from 200 to 100,000 monthly active users in under 6 months
→ Reached a $1M run rate in about 10 months
→ Tracked 109 years of sobri...

Bao's job was automating other people's jobs.

So he automated his own.

His team used to forward deploy the old way — go into customers' offices, sit next to their teams, watch how the work actually got done, then build the automations by hand.

Then they asked the obvious question: why are humans doing all of this?

Now Hessian's AI agents construct a digital twin of your business, map your back-office workflows, and take the work over end-to-end — plugging into whatever you already use.

Slack. HubSpot. Salesforce.

No new...

Most founders don't need another lawyer.

They need a better system.

Jessica Hubley spent years in Big Law, served as General Counsel at a venture-backed startup, and built her own practice serving startup founders.

She kept seeing the same problem.

Not that founders lacked intelligence.

They lacked exposure to the legal playbook.

They didn't know what kind of lawyer they needed.
Or what needed to happen next.

So she built Story.

"Story.law is your expert General Counsel - fear no legal!"<...

10 coding agents running in parallel.

Zero idea which one finished.

That was the problem.

Around November, Austin Wang and his co-founder Lawrence Chen stopped opening their IDE.

They weren't writing code by hand anymore

Everything ran through Claude Code and Codex in the terminal

10 panes. 10 agents. 10 copies of the repo.

And two problems appeared almost immediately.

They couldn't tell what each agent...

Most companies don't need smarter AI. They need AI they can actually deploy

OpenClaw is brilliant but can be brutal to set up. Days of configs. 

Agents messaging random contacts on WhatsApp...

Tensol: one click. Five minutes. Each AI employee runs 24/7 in its own isolated VM with full company context

Connect Slack, GitHub, Sentry, HubSpot, Gmail. Every action logged. Enterprise-grade security built in

When we recorded this ep: ~100 AI employees running. 300K+ Twitter views

Most companies think they have a documentation problem.

They don't.

They have a context problem.

Every company runs on things that were never written down - they just live in people's heads.

That's the insight that led Max Arnold and his co-founders Leon Iwanowitsch & David Korn to start Ontora (YC P26).

Because AI agents can only be as useful as the context they're given.

And most organizations have never...

Every company runs on a hidden workforce.

The people who reset the passwords. Clear the MFA requests. Provision the access. Push the tickets through the systems so the rest of the company can work.

Seb Poole wants to give that work to agents.

Not a better way to track the request. A workforce that completes it.

He's seen the problem from the inside.

His last company, Frankie Health, was acquired by Unmind - a leading workplace mental health provider whose customers include Disney and Uber.

At every...